Weighbridge Hardware Integration

Weighbridge Integration, Grain Storage and Invoice Generation

Fussell Farms clean, dry and store oilseed and grain for farmers throughout the south of England. They have an existing commodity storage database, developed in 1996 by PC Access Ltd, for managing intakes, treatments, storage and discharges.

With increased demand for their services, our client wanted to integrate their core database with the weighbridge, to reduce the time currently spent entering the data manually.

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The Problem

Staff input information at the end of each day from the printouts produced by the weighbridge printer. This had to be checked carefully for data entry errors.

Steady growth in the business meant that staff were finding it difficult to keep on top of the administrative workload and maintain accuracy. In addition, the company needed greater flexibility, such as being able to adapt charging on a customer as well as a product basis, and being able to adjust acceptable margins for moisture content, pest infestation and other treatments as requirements dictated.

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The Solution

We developed a custom real-time interface to the Avery Berkel weighbridge (Avery Weigh-Tronix), which is integrated with the central administration database. The weight of each load of grain is now automatically recorded, together with any treatment required and additional commodity data. Information is validated during the normal weighbridge operation, and a weighbridge ticket is printed.

Invoices are automatically generated with the correct charges applied. With greater built-in flexibility, charges are calculated according to the commodity and treatment required, with customer discounts applied. Invoices for storage fees are sent out each month, detailing the accumulated storage charge for each commodity held in store by each customer.

In a subsequent update we incorporated a blending on discharge function to allow a blended product to be discharged with automatic proportions of the constituent commodities automatically calculated and a consolidated discharge ticket produced.

Custom reports allow the business owners to track grain intakes, discharges and current totals by day, by product, by shed location, or by customer. Storage levels and income earned can also be monitored by product, treatment, service, or by customer.

Technical

Implemented in Microsoft Access with a custom API to the Avery Weigh-Tronix weighbridge software Weight for Windows

Many thanks to Anna and Tony at PC Access.

Our grain storage database handles all our invoicing including calculating charges, which already saves us a great deal of time. Demand for treating and storing grain and other commodities had increased to such an extent that our old system was struggling to keep up.

Now that the weighbridge has been integrated the time saving has been colossal. There is also much less chance of error. In spite of a tight deadline, the new system was up and running before the start of the summer rush.

Andy Fussell, Business Partner